editorNPR Digital Services RSS Generator 0.94Geoff Nunberg is the linguist contributor on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of The Way We Talk Now , Going Nucular , Talking Right and The Years of Talking Dangerously . His most recent book is Ascent of the A-Word . His website is www.geoffreynunberg.com .NPR Digital Services RSS Generator 0.94Geoff NunbergThu, 07 Dec 2017 01:01:39 +0000Geoff Nunberghttp://krwg.org
Geoff NunbergIt's word-of-the-year time again. Collins Dictionary chose " Fake news " and Dictionary.com went with " complicit ." Others have proposed #metoo, "alternative facts," "take a knee," "resistance" and "snowflake." It's striking how many of those are the words and phrases that warring political camps have been hurling at each other across our deepening national divide. The Trump presidency didn't create that rift but it sort of made it official. The acrimonious climate has ruined a lot of Thanksgivings, as two economists recently demonstrated . Using cellphone tracking data, they found that Americans from politically divided families spent 20 minutes less time at the holiday dinner table after the election than the year before. Wonkish terms like " hyper-polarization " don't begin to convey that sense of unrelenting rancor. Instead, the meme of the moment is to say that American politics has become "tribal," which I'll make my word of the year. It's not a new word even in that meaning,As Fissures Between Political Camps Grow, 'Tribalism' Emerges As The Word Of 2017http://krwg.org/post/fissures-between-political-camps-grow-tribalism-emerges-word-2017
149704 as http://krwg.orgWed, 06 Dec 2017 20:42:00 +0000As Fissures Between Political Camps Grow, 'Tribalism' Emerges As The Word Of 2017Geoff NunbergIf you're into counterculture kitsch, you might want to check out the nostalgia-themed resort hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida. It features a "Hippy Dippy" swimming pool, surrounded by flower-shaped water jets, peace signs and giant letters that spell out "Peace, Man," "Out of Sight" and "Can You Dig It?" Fifty years after the Summer of Love, that's been the fate of a lot of the language we associate with that era — faded psychedelia, sort of like acid rock and tie-dye, except that nobody ever tries to revive it. Well, slang is like that: The words come in on one tide and are swept out again on the next. But it's striking how many words from the hippie era are still with us, from "uptight" to "bummer" to "freak show." As brief as the moment was, it changed the way we think and talk. What people call the Summer of Love only lasted for about 10 months in all. Most accounts date its start from Jan. 14, 1967, when 20,000 or 30,000 hippies assembled in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park50 Years After The Summer Of Love, Hippie Counterculture Is Relegated To Kitschhttp://krwg.org/post/50-years-after-summer-love-hippie-counterculture-relegated-kitsch
145848 as http://krwg.orgWed, 04 Oct 2017 17:51:00 +000050 Years After The Summer Of Love, Hippie Counterculture Is Relegated To KitschGeoff NunbergGeoff Nunberg ( @GeoffNunberg ) is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly after Amazon introduced the Kindle, they put up a page with a ranked list of the most frequently highlighted passages across all the books. It's not there anymore, but when I first looked at the list in 2013, the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice was in third place. That was all the more impressive because eight of the other top 10 finishers were passages from the Hunger Games series, which was the hit of the season that year, as Austen's novel had been exactly 200 years earlier. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." We can argue about whether that's the most famous first line in English literature or whether the honor belongs to the opening sentence of Moby Dick or A Tale of Two Cities or 1984 . But there's no other opening sentence that lends itself so well toThe Enduring Legacy Of Jane Austen's 'Truth Universally Acknowledged'http://krwg.org/post/enduring-legacy-jane-austens-truth-universally-acknowledged
141601 as http://krwg.orgTue, 25 Jul 2017 18:09:00 +0000The Enduring Legacy Of Jane Austen's 'Truth Universally Acknowledged'Geoff Nunberghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unz1CGoFVMU The only literary work about punctuation I'm aware of is an odd early story by Anton Chekhov called "The Exclamation Mark." After getting into an argument with a colleague about punctuation, a school inspector named Yefim Perekladin asks his wife what an exclamation point is for. She tells him it signifies delight, indignation, joy and rage. He realizes that in 40 years of writing official reports, he has never had the need to express any of those emotions. As Perekladin obsesses about the mark, it becomes an apparition that haunts his waking life, mocking him as an unfeeling machine. In desperation, he signs his name in a visitors book and puts three exclamation points after it. All of a sudden, Chekhov writes, "He felt delight and indignation, he was joyful and seethed with rage." Yefim Perekladin, c'est moi! At least, I used to be one of those people who use the exclamation point as sparingly as possible. We'll grudgingly stick one inAfter Years Of Restraint, A Linguist Says 'Yes!' To The Exclamation Pointhttp://krwg.org/post/after-years-restraint-linguist-says-yes-exclamation-point
139048 as http://krwg.orgTue, 13 Jun 2017 16:29:00 +0000After Years Of Restraint, A Linguist Says 'Yes!' To The Exclamation PointGeoff NunbergIt wasn't a serious political gaffe, but it was awkward. On Feb. 12, the Republican National Committee tweeted a picture of the Lincoln Memorial along with the quote, "'And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count; it's the life in your years' — Abraham Lincoln." You'd have figured the party of Lincoln would have come up with something a little more consequential than an adage about staying sprightly in your declining years. It didn't sound very Lincolnesque, and people quickly pointed out that he never said anything of the sort. Some took that tweet as another occasion to deplore the plague of bogus quotations on the Internet. That's fair enough. But quotations can be bogus in different ways. Some are purely fraudulent, as when people ascribe a modern political sentiment to some historical figure to give it a phony pedigree. It's like slapping a thick coat of varnish on a recent painting and trying to pass it off on eBay as a Rembrandt. The Thomas Jefferson website atLincoln Said What? Bogus Quotations Take On A New Life On Social Mediahttp://krwg.org/post/lincoln-said-what-bogus-quotations-take-new-life-social-media
137268 as http://krwg.orgMon, 15 May 2017 15:34:00 +0000Lincoln Said What? Bogus Quotations Take On A New Life On Social MediaGeoff NunbergIt's been an unusual political year, to put it mildly, and you could write most of its story just by tracking its effects on the lexicon — the new words and new uses of old ones, some useful, some that we could do without. I'll come to some of these in a minute. But for my word of the year, I'll go with "normal" and its sister "normalize." That may seem perverse for a year like this one, but when people are talking a lot about normal it's a sign that we're living in extraordinary times. Start with "the new normal." Since the beginning of the century, that's how we've announced that events have forced us to accept new realities. In 2002 the new normal was long airport lines. In 2009 it was kids moving back in with their parents. Then came school lockdowns, soaring college debt and safe spaces. But when you search on the phrase now, the results are always political. For some it's an energized racist fringe . For a writer at Forbes it's Pizzagate and online vigilantism . For The'Normal': The Word Of The Year (In A Year That Was Anything But)http://krwg.org/post/normal-word-year-year-was-anything
128326 as http://krwg.orgThu, 22 Dec 2016 18:47:00 +0000'Normal': The Word Of The Year (In A Year That Was Anything But)Geoff NunbergIt has become a familiar story in a world bristling with live mics. A public figure is caught out using a vulgarity, and the media have to decide how to report the remark. Web media tend to be explicit, but the traditional media are more circumspect. Take the vulgar epithet that George W. Bush was overheard using to describe a New York Times reporter during the 2000 presidential campaign. Some newspapers printed it with dashes or asterisks. Others said it was a word that rhymed with "casserole" or "glass bowl." And The New York Times itself described the word as an obscenity, which made it sound worse than it was. It's easy to ridicule that coyness. Concealing the letters of a word with asterisks is the orthographic equivalent of covering them with pasties and a G-string --they manage to make it look both less shocking and more salacious. Anyway, whom exactly do editors imagine they're protecting? Some of them plead the familiar defense of "not in front of the children." The editors ofNot Fit To Print? When Politicians Talk Dirty, Media Scramble To Sanitizehttp://krwg.org/post/not-fit-print-when-politicians-talk-dirty-media-scramble-sanitize
124942 as http://krwg.orgTue, 25 Oct 2016 17:32:00 +0000Not Fit To Print? When Politicians Talk Dirty, Media Scramble To SanitizeGeoff NunbergWherever you look, this is the year of white working-class males — or, as Donald Trump describes them, "the smart, smart, smart people that don't have the big education." Who are they, and why are they sticking with Trump even as other voters are peeling away? Sociologists talk about the disaffected white underclass. Marxists talk about the lumpenproletariat , or riffraff, which makes " Trumpenproletariat " almost irresistible. But others on both the left and right have used more familiar epithets. A columnist in the New York Daily News calls Trump's supporters " bigots, bumpkins and rednecks ." The New York Post calls them the " hillbilly class " and " white trash Americans ." Back in 1989, the historian C. Vann Woodward said that "redneck" is the only epithet for an ethnic minority that's still permitted in polite company. He could have said the same thing about "hillbilly" or "white trash." The fact is that Americans don't find class prejudice quite as shameful as racism. CollegeA Resurgence Of 'Redneck' Pride, Marked By Race, Class And Trumphttp://krwg.org/post/resurgence-redneck-pride-marked-race-class-and-trump
122116 as http://krwg.orgTue, 06 Sep 2016 18:27:00 +0000A Resurgence Of 'Redneck' Pride, Marked By Race, Class And TrumpGeoff Nunberg"I am the law-and-order candidate." With that proclamation in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump made it official that he'd be recycling the themes and language of Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. A lot of observers were quick to point out that 2016 is no 1968 and that Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon . As it happens, "law and order" isn't what it once was, either. "Law and order" is an archaic expression, from the Latin "lex et ordo." Over the course of American history, it's the cry that the people in charge have raised to confront the threat of violence bubbling up from below — whether as popular insurrections, public disorders, radical agitators or gangs. It was a phrase invoked to condemn the striking auto workers in Flint in 1936 and the demonstrations organized by Martin Luther King in Birmingham in 1963. But for most Americans of the Nixon era, "law and order" was saturated with the mythology of the Old West. Hollywood made at least five Western films with that very title, mostIs Trump's Call For 'Law And Order' A Coded Racial Message?http://krwg.org/post/trumps-call-law-and-order-coded-racial-message
119612 as http://krwg.orgThu, 28 Jul 2016 19:21:00 +0000Is Trump's Call For 'Law And Order' A Coded Racial Message?Geoff Nunberg"The way kids speak today, I'm here to tell you." Over the course of history, every aging generation has made that complaint , and it has always turned out to be overblown. That's just as well. If the language really had been deteriorating all this time, we'd all be grunting like bears by now. But when it comes to language, history is bunk. Or anyway, it hasn't deterred critics from monitoring the speech of today's young people for the signs of cultural decline. In fact it was a professor of history named Molly Worthen who raised an alarm in The New York Times recently about the way millennials start their sentences with "I feel like," as in, "I feel like the media should concentrate more on the issues." That expression may sound merely diffident, Worthen says, but its real purpose is to avoid confrontation by turning every statement into a feeling that halts an argument in its tracks — how can you say that my experience isn't valid? In the end, she says, "I feel like" makes logicalIrked By The Way Millennials Speak? 'I Feel Like' It's Time To Loosen Uphttp://krwg.org/post/irked-way-millennials-speak-i-feel-its-time-loosen
115506 as http://krwg.orgTue, 24 May 2016 18:26:00 +0000Irked By The Way Millennials Speak? 'I Feel Like' It's Time To Loosen UpGeoff NunbergThe French have gotten themselves into one of their recurrent linguistic lathers , this one over the changes in their spelling that will be taking effect in the fall. The changes were originally proposed more than 25 years ago. But nothing much came of them until the government recently announced that they'd be incorporated in the new textbooks, at which point traditionalists took to the barricades. The government has made a point of calling the changes "rectifications" rather than reforms, and on the whole they're pretty minor. A few words like "le week-end" and "le strip-tease" will lose their hyphens. The word for onion, "oignon," will have to give up its silent i. But what people have gotten most worked up about is the elimination of many of the circumflexes. That's the pointy little hat that sits on top of vowels in words like " hôtel" and "tête-à-tête," marking the spot where a letter was lost sometime in the past. The changes are supposed to make the written language easier toChanges To French Spelling Make Us Wonder: Why Is English So Weird?http://krwg.org/post/changes-french-spelling-make-us-wonder-why-english-so-weird
109437 as http://krwg.orgWed, 24 Feb 2016 19:12:00 +0000Changes To French Spelling Make Us Wonder: Why Is English So Weird?Geoff NunbergTalk about belated recognition. At its meeting in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 7, the American Dialect Society voted to make the 600-year-old pronoun "they" their word of the year for 2015. Or more precisely, a particular use of that pronoun that grammarians call the singular "they." This is the "they" that doesn't care whether it's referring to a male or female. As in "If I get a call, tell them they can call me back." Or "Did someone leave their books here?" As ordinary as it is, that use of "they" has always been a bit disreputable — you might say it, but you wouldn't want to write it down. But now it's a pronoun whose hour has come. A few months ago, the Washington Post style guide accepted it. And it's been welcomed by people who identify as genderqueer and who feel that "he" and "she" don't necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. Universities allow students to select it as their personal pronoun. And so does Facebook, so that your friends will get notices like "Wish them aEveryone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Nothttp://krwg.org/post/everyone-uses-singular-they-whether-they-realize-it-or-not
106555 as http://krwg.orgWed, 13 Jan 2016 18:32:00 +0000Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or NotGeoff NunbergThe obvious candidates for word of the year are the labels of the year's big stories — new words like " microaggression " or resurgent ones like " refugees ." But sometimes a big theme is captured in more subtle ways. So for my word of the year, I offer you the revival of "gig" as the name for a new economic order. It's the last chapter in the life of a little word that has tracked the rise and fall of the great American job. "Gig" goes back more than a century as musicians' slang for a date or engagement. Nobody's sure where it originally came from, though there are lots of imaginative theories out there. But the word didn't have any particular glamour until the 1950s, when the hipsters and the Beats adapted it to mean any job you took to keep body and soul together while your real life was elsewhere. The earliest example of that usage of the word that I've found is from a 1952 piece by Jack Kerouac, talking about his gig as a part-time brakeman for the Southern Pacific railroad inGoodbye Jobs, Hello 'Gigs': How One Word Sums Up A New Economic Realityhttp://krwg.org/post/goodbye-jobs-hello-gigs-how-one-word-sums-new-economic-reality
106395 as http://krwg.orgMon, 11 Jan 2016 19:43:00 +0000Goodbye Jobs, Hello 'Gigs': How One Word Sums Up A New Economic RealityGeoff NunbergTo listen to the media tell it, "so" is busting out all over — or at least at the beginning of a sentence. New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas calls "so" the new "um" and "like"; others call it a plague and a fad . It's like a lot of other grammatical fixations: Not everybody cares about it, but the ones who do care care a whole lot. When NPR's Weekend Edition asked listeners last year to pick the most-misused word or phrase in the language, that sentence-initial "so" came in in second place, right behind "between you and I" and ahead of venerable bugbears like misusing "literally" and confusing "who" and "whom." That's a meteoric rise for a peeve that wasn't even on the radar a decade ago. NPR itself has been singled out for overuse of "so" by both interviewees and hosts. That prompted the NPR head of standards and practices to calculate how many times the hosts and reporters on the major NPR news programs had started sentences with "so" in a single week in August of 2014.So, What's The Big Deal With Starting A Sentence With 'So'? http://krwg.org/post/so-whats-big-deal-starting-sentence-so
97823 as http://krwg.orgThu, 03 Sep 2015 17:35:00 +0000So, What's The Big Deal With Starting A Sentence With 'So'? Geoff NunbergTracing The Origin Of The Campaign Promise To 'Tell It Like It Is' http://krwg.org/post/tracing-origin-campaign-promise-tell-it-it
94572 as http://krwg.orgWed, 15 Jul 2015 17:45:00 +0000Tracing The Origin Of The Campaign Promise To 'Tell It Like It Is' Geoff NunbergWe English-speakers take a perverse pride in the orneriness of our spelling, which is one reason why the spelling bee has been a popular entertainment since the 19th century. It's fun watching schoolchildren getting difficult words right. It can be even more entertaining to watch literate adults getting them wrong. I've seen that first-hand when I served as the judge for a spelling bee for San Francisco-area writers that's held as an annual benefit for a Berkeley literary clearinghouse called Small Press Distribution. It's just as well that my status as a linguist precludes my being a contestant, since I'd probably go down on the first round. The only reason I've been able to keep my deficiencies as a speller under wraps is that now I have technology to intercede between me and my readers. Not a month goes by that spellcheck doesn't remind me that "resistant" has an a in it or that "temperamental" has two. I do usually get the middle vowel of "separate" right, but only because I stillWhat's A Thamakau? Spelling Bee Is More About Entertainment Than Englishhttp://krwg.org/post/whats-thamakau-spelling-bee-more-about-entertainment-english
92303 as http://krwg.orgThu, 11 Jun 2015 17:37:00 +0000What's A Thamakau? Spelling Bee Is More About Entertainment Than EnglishGeoff NunbergHBO's Silicon Valley is back, with its pitch-perfect renderings of the culture and language of the tech world — like at the opening of the "Disrupt" startup competition run by the Tech Crunch website at the end of last season. "We're making the world a better place through scalable fault-tolerant distributed databases" — the show's writers didn't have to exercise their imagination much to come up with those little arias of geeky self-puffery, or with the name Disrupt, which, as it happens, is what the Tech Crunch conferences are actually called. As is most everything else these days. "Disrupt" and "disruptive" are ubiquitous in the names of conferences, websites, business school degree programs and business book best-sellers. The words pop up in more than 500 TED Talks: "How to Avoid Disruption in Business and in Life," "Embracing Disruption," "Disrupting Higher Education," "Disrupt Yourself." It transcends being a mere buzzword. As the philosopher Jeremy Bentham said two centuries agoFrom TED Talks To Taco Bell, Abuzz With Silicon Valley-Style 'Disruption'http://krwg.org/post/ted-talks-taco-bell-abuzz-silicon-valley-style-disruption
89350 as http://krwg.orgMon, 27 Apr 2015 17:31:00 +0000From TED Talks To Taco Bell, Abuzz With Silicon Valley-Style 'Disruption'Geoff NunbergI think of English usage as one of those subjects like cocktails or the British royal family. A lot of people take a passing interest in it but you never know who's going to turn out to be a true believer — the kind of person who complains about the grammar errors on restaurant menus. "Waiter, there's a split infinitive in my soup!" For single-minded devotion to grammatical rectitude, you'd be hard-pressed to match a Wikipedia editor named Bryan Henderson, who goes by the user name of Giraffedata. He was the subject of a piece by Andrew McMillan on the long-form site Medium that provoked a lot of debate . Giraffedata has a single bee in his bonnet, the phrase "comprised of." He has written a 6,000-word essay on his Wikipedia user page explaining why he thinks it's an egregious error. And to drive home his point, he has made 47,000 edits over the last eight years, most of them aimed at purging the phrase wherever it occurs on the Wikipedia site. He doesn't show it any mercy even when itDon't You Dare Use 'Comprised Of' On Wikipedia: One Editor Will Take It Outhttp://krwg.org/post/dont-you-dare-use-comprised-wikipedia-one-editor-will-take-it-out
86389 as http://krwg.orgThu, 12 Mar 2015 19:39:00 +0000Don't You Dare Use 'Comprised Of' On Wikipedia: One Editor Will Take It OutGeoff Nunberg"Infobesity," "lumbersexual," "phablet." As usual, the items that stand out as candidates for word of the year are like its biggest pop songs, catchy but ephemeral. But even a fleeting expression can sometimes encapsulate the zeitgeist. That's why I'm nominating "God view" for the honor. It's the term that the car service company Uber uses for a map view that shows the locations of all the Uber cars in an area and silhouettes of the people who ordered them. The media seized on the term this fall when it came out that the company had been entertaining itself and its guests by pairing that view with its customer data so it could display the movements of journalists and VIP customers as they made their way around New York. Those reports came on top of earlier criticisms of Uber for taking a prurient interest in its customers' movements. Not long before, an Uber data scientist had blogged about tracking what he called " rides of glory ." Those were the customers who booked rides late onFeeling Watched? 'God View' Is Geoff Nunberg's Word Of The Yearhttp://krwg.org/post/forget-creepy-nunbergs-word-year-bigger-and-two-god-view
80161 as http://krwg.orgWed, 10 Dec 2014 19:38:00 +0000Feeling Watched? 'God View' Is Geoff Nunberg's Word Of The YearGeoff NunbergTo judge from some of the headlines, it was a very big deal. At an event held at the Royal Society in London, for the first time ever, a computer passed the Turing Test, which is widely taken as the benchmark for saying a machine is engaging in intelligent thought. But like the other much-hyped triumphs of artificial intelligence, this one wasn't quite what it appeared. Computers can do things that seem quintessentially human, but they usually take a different path to get there. IBM's Deep Blue mastered chess not by refining its intuitions but by evaluating hundreds of millions of positions per second. Watson won at Jeopardy not by wide reading but by swallowing all of Wikipedia in a single gulp. And as the software that reportedly beat the Turing Test showed, computers don't even go about making small talk the same way we do. The Turing Test takes its name from a 1950 paper by Alan Turing, the British mathematician who laid out the foundations of modern computer science. Turing hadDo Feelings Compute? If Not, The Turing Test Doesn't Mean Muchhttp://krwg.org/post/do-feelings-compute-if-not-turing-test-doesnt-mean-much
69586 as http://krwg.orgTue, 01 Jul 2014 19:36:00 +0000Do Feelings Compute? If Not, The Turing Test Doesn't Mean Much